When people ask me what a Natural Cosmetic is, I often make the comparison with organic apples. You can pluck an apple from the tree and eat it on the spot, nothing added, nothing taken away.

Cosmetics are different. You cannot pluck flowers and just put them in a bottle: Natural Cosmetics are products who’s ingredients are treated in some way.

So the question arises: how may they be treated?

Part of the answer is easy: mechanical processes like mixing and pressing are allowed. Very similar to pressing an olive oil, mechanical processes leave valuable ingredients largely intact. They are not chemically transformed. 

But there are products for which some ingredients need to be chemically transformed: soaps are a typical example and so are creams and shampoos. And this is where the definition of Natural Cosmetics becomes really important. It is where we define the boundaries.

These boundaries must be strict and that is why we allow only very few processes to chemically transform natural ingredients (they are listed in our official criteria). It is important that these rules are not random: all raw materials may be treated with these processes only, without exception.

Applying uniform rules allows us to achieve what makes the NATRUE standard unique: we limit the overall amount of chemically transformed ingredients in the final product, thereby making sure that products remain as natural as they can be. 

To take an example: a skin care emulsion (W/O) can contain no more than 15% of chemically transformed ingredients. This is necessary for the cream to perform its function but we don't allow more. No matter how many ingredients a manufacturer may wish to chemically transform, their quantity can never exceed 15 % of the overall ingredients.

Predictability for manufacturers
The fact that we make no exceptions also means that the permitted processes can be used on all natural raw materials.

Let's take saponification (the process of making soap) as an example. You can use it to make soap out of coconut oil and you can use it to make soap out of other natural ingredients of your choice – be it olive oil, fatty acids or something else.

It is up to the manufacturer to choose the appropriate ingredients,  presuming of course that the product meets all criteria for naturalness and product safety. 

This gives producers predictability. Say a company wanted to make soap with a plant that has never been used for soaps before: the product will be certified even if the ingredient is not yet mentioned in our list of chemically transformed ingredients (we call these ingredients Derived Natural Ingredients).

This list (in Annex 3 of the full criteria) is therefore not a Positive List but an indicative list - a helpful overview of ingredients that may typically be used.

To summarise all the above in a nutshell: our strict definition of the NATRUE standard along transparent processes makes life easier for manufacturers while also ensuring that every product is as natural as it can be.

Read more about the NATRUE guarantee here
This article by Rita Stiens explains what can happen without such guarantee.